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Preface: Biocultural Identities
- University of Michigan Press
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Preface Biocultural Identities The End of Normal attempts to bring together speculations on identity in the early part of the twenty-first century. in our age it is less and less possible to think of human identity, indeed even animal identity, without grounding what we know in the terrain of the biocultural. i use that term, coined by david Morris (with whom i cowrote chapter 9) and promulgated by a number of people including myself, to describe the intersection among the cultural, social, political, technological, medical, and biological. The well of this book resides in issues around the body and the mind in the context of disability and disability studies. i explore sexuality, emotion, psychology, genetics, death, narrative, performance, and a host of other issues through a complex interdisciplinary lens. My inclination as a writer and thinker often leads me toward being a contrarian, or so i’m told. consequently, many of the chapters in the book will provoke objections on many fronts, as well as some agreement if i’m either lucky or right. Those who are strong supporters of identity politics and diversity will take offense, i imagine, at the opening chapter of this book. others who treat depression or are taking medicine to cure their depression will find my opinions on this subject either sadly lacking or just dead wrong. Those in the disability community who are strongly opposed to physician-assisted suicide will find much to dislike in my chapter on the subject. Physicians who daily must perform the act of diagnosis might indeed find problematic my raising questions about the very nature of diagnosis itself, particularly that of affective disorders. Those who are viii • Preface convinced that freud was a patriarchal sexist will perhaps howl when i suggest that he was one of the first advocates of a liberated view of gender. as far as i am aware, such contrarian positions do not appear out of sheer perversity. rather, i think, my being professionally situated between discourses, as my university titles might suggest,1 leads me to see instinctively and institutionally the other side (or sides) of any discipline. Within one profession, truths are often quite clear. but those truths (almost always temporary, by the way) are less apparent to those in other disciplines. and it is probably true that within any discipline, even accepted truths are only accepted by a certain percentage of those within the area of study. so my ability to, say, apply a filter of disability studies over discussions of race or gender necessarily provides a corrective view, as does bringing the viewpoint of cultural studies, for example, to the study of affective disorders or neuropsychiatry. of course the danger of such iconoclasm is that you risk being an amateur in a professional setting—a jack-of-all-trades in a world in which increasing specialization is the rule. for the past few years i’ve been critiquing some aspects of medicine. To a researcher in that field there is a succinct and ready putdown of my work: “his degree is in english and comparative literature.” That academic contrarian pedigree is proof in itself , within certain circles, of the fact that i should have no right to comment on what properly trained people do. it is true enough that my degree is not in medicine, and yet at base i do believe that knowledge is not a franchise and that anyone, with diligent study and research, can broach disciplines that have often erected thick and tall walls to keep out noninitiates . in the realm of science, for example, even experts are only experts in their rather narrow chosen field of study. for them to step back and survey the general practice of science or medicine, they will have to do exactly what i and others do.They will have to learn about other aspects of science or medicine in which they have no particular expertise. in other words, all general statements are hobbled or perhaps supercharged by the fact that they have to go in seriously interdisciplinary directions. in general, i have been between disciplines and areas of specialization. i like to think that i’m even “between between.” That interstitial viewpoint can have its advantages. but, as i have been saying, it can lead to being left out of the shoptalk. on the other hand, i have been heartened that my colleagues in disability studies, for example, have welcomed me into a world that can be parochially defined by a...